Larry Thomas, a partner at Edward Jones, is clear about his first priority as newly elected board chair at Provident, Inc.
“We need more resources,” Thomas said. “The more supporters we have, the more people we will be able to help.”
Provident is a mental health agency, headquartered in Midtown St. Louis, that provides counseling, suicide prevention and intervention, and community support programs. Its staff of 128 (52 full-time and 76 part-time) and 127 volunteers currently serves more than 40,000 individuals and families in the region.
For Thomas, that is not enough.
“There are more people experiencing trouble, more people experiencing need,” he said. “I want to make our services available to more people. I want to go deeper into the community. I don’t know, is 50,000 people served the right place? I want to make more services available to help more folks.”
To provide more services, Provident needs more community awareness – newspaper interviews can help with that – and more “resources,” by which Thomas means more money. The “Spirit of Provident” annual gala is one way the agency raises fund.
This year’s gala will be held Friday, February 26 at the Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis. Dr. William H. Danforth, chancellor emeritus at Washington University, is gala chair. The 2016 “Spirit of Provident” awardees are Risa Zwerling, a Provident board member, and Mark Wrighton, current Washington University chancellor (and her spouse). Tickets are $170; register at www.providentstl.org.
The fundraising goal for the gala is $125,000. Funds raised will go towards Provident’s operations. Its 2015 budget expenses were nearly $6 million. Its 2015 allocation from the United Way, the agency’s single largest funder, was $2.1 million. That was 36 percent of its total budget and 84 percent of its public support.
One upgrade the agency needs, according to Sherry Gerke, director of development, is to replace its “antiquated phone system.” She estimated that $100,000 is needed to install an updated phone system.
Jane Smith, director of Life Crisis Services at Provident, said the agency answers 80-100 calls a day, or 30,000 calls a year. She said 15 to 21 percent of those callers are suicidal. Provident’s crisis hotline is 314-647-4357 or text “HELP” to 314-226-1147.
“People don’t realize, with all the attention that murder gets, that the suicide rate is twice as high as the homicide rate,” Smith said.
Nationally, the discrepancy is higher than that. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013 there were 41,149 suicides in the United States, compared to 16,121 murders – that’s 2.5 suicides for every murder.
Locally, the numbers are different. In 2015, St. Louis County Police Department investigated more homicides (38) than suicides (28); in 2014, those percentages were roughly inverted, with more suicides (38) than homicides (26). The County PD does not patrol the entire county. (The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department does not collect statistics for suicide, so no comparison was readily available for the city.)
Smith said that Provident’s call volume spiked after the Ferguson police shooting of Michael Brown Jr. and the militarized police response to protests, but not all of that was a Ferguson effect. Two days after Brown was killed on August 9, 2014, the beloved actor and comedian Robin Williams killed himself, and highly publicized suicides tend to result in more crisis calls.
Provident has a counseling office in Ferguson, located at 409 South Florissant Rd., that opened a year before the police shooting and unrest. That office did experience some cancellations during the period of unrest, Smith said, as some clients were unsure of their safety.
Provident’s newest counseling center is its South County Office, located at 11222 Tesson Ferry Rd., Suite 100, which opened on February 1. It also has offices in Mid County (12755 Olive Blvd. in Creve Coeur) and the Metro East (5016 North Illinois St., Suite A in Fairview Heights), as well as at its headquarters, 2650 Olive St. in St. Louis. The first appointment line for all locations is 314-533-8200.
Provident serves clients across a wide spectrum of needs, including crisis counseling, treatment for anxiety and depression, teen self-injury, child play therapy, and court-required ex-offender therapies.
As for Thomas, he previously served as vice chair of the Provident board and replaces Stuart Greenbaum, former dean of the Olin School of Business at Washington University, as board chair. Thomas has served on the board since Greenbaum pressed him into service in 2009.
Greenbaum was a former finance professor of Thomas’ at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where Thomas earned his MBA while already employed at Edward Jones in St. Louis. (“I flew to Chicago 72 times,” Thomas said.) Then Washington University recruited Greenbaum to chair its business school, Provident recruited him to chair its board, and Greenbaum recruited Thomas to serve with him on the board.
“When Stuart called me, I told him my plate was pretty full, but he said I ought to look into it,” Thomas said. “So I did some research. I thought about the need, what people need – counseling and, though we don’t like to think about suicide, it happens all the time. And I decided that Provident is a place where I can probably make a difference.”
The Provident crisis hotline is 314-647-4357 or text “HELP” to 314-226-1147. The first appointment line is 314-533-8200.
Tickets to the “Spirit of Provident” gala are $170; register at www.providentstl.org.
